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CARTOONS / ZERO GRAVITY

Aug 22, 2010

Stretched Tattoo

EDITORIALS

Aug 22, 2010

End of Operation Iraqi Freedom

Officially, it's over. Thursday's withdrawal of the 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, the last U.S. combat brigade in Iraq, marked the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The move fulfilled the promise of U.S. President Barack Obama to end his country's combat mission in Iraq by the end of August....

COMMENTARY

Aug 22, 2010

Flying the humanitarian flag among Muslims

By Tom Plate

NEW YORK — What's the one major issue the West absolutely and totally must get right in the years ahead? If the obvious answer is not peaceful international relations with an increasingly assertive China, then it has to be the West's ever-more complicated relationship with the world's Muslims.

COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT

Aug 22, 2010

How to stand, individually, against your nation on the warpath?

By Roger Pulvers

A dilemma confronts each and every citizen of a country at war: what to do if you believe that your country is in the wrong?

EDITORIALS

Aug 21, 2010

Pension reform urgently needed

In fiscal 2009, the premium payment rate for the kokumin nenkin pension, which is mainly for self-employed and jobless people, dropped to its lowest ever at 59.98 percent. The rate is 2.1 points less than in the previous year and fell for the fourth straight year. It is an ominous sign that the premium...

EDITORIALS

Aug 21, 2010

Bid to boot a unilateralist mayor

Citizens of the city of Akune, Kagoshima Prefecture, have started collecting signatures in an effort to initiate a referendum to recall Mayor Shinichi Takehara, who repeatedly made unilateral decisions on matters that in principal require approval of the assembly. His decisions include those on a budget...

COMMENTARY

Aug 21, 2010

China's cautionary tale

By Gwynne Dyer

Will the 21st century belong to China? For a while, perhaps — but only in the sense that it was said to belong to Japan in the 1980s. Looking back now, that seems ridiculous, but at the time best-selling books were predicting that Americans, not to mention the rest of the planet, would be reduced to...

COMMENTARY / World

Aug 20, 2010

Hostility against Jews increasing in Sweden

By Ronald S. Lauder

VIENNA — Last month, firecrackers were thrown at the only synagogue in the Swedish city of Malmo, breaking three windows. The day before, a bomb threat had been left at the building, warning of what was about to happen. Two weeks earlier, another attack was launched against the same synagogue.

EDITORIALS

Aug 20, 2010

Dealing with disaster

Every day another deluge. Pakistan is battling what the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs calls "the worst monsoon-related floods in living memory." Rains have triggered landslides in China that have claimed more than 1,000 lives. In Russia, rain would be welcome: Wild fires have...

COMMENTARY / World

Aug 20, 2010

Consequences of U.S. debt

By Mario Margiocco

MILAN — Italians and other Europeans have serious problems addressing their own national debts, public and private, so it may seem immodest for a European to discuss America's growing and grave debt problem.

EDITORIALS

Aug 19, 2010

Corporate social responsibility

On Aug. 4, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the second and third richest men in the world, announced that 40 American billionaires had followed their lead in pledging to give half of their fortunes to charity. They plan to turn their efforts next to China and India.

COMMENTARY

Aug 19, 2010

Another 'pearl' in Beijing's string of ports

By Michael Richardson

A newly constructed harbor at Hambantota, near Sri Lanka's southern tip, began filling with water recently in readiness for the first ships in November. The port — which will have a water depth of 17 meters, making it one of the deepest in South Asia — has been carved out of coastal land in a joint...

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Japan's growing ranks of centenarians are redefining what it means to live in a super-aging society.

What comes after 100?

By Tomoko Otake

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Smile! It’s ‘Sanrio Time,’ now and ever after

Smile! It’s ‘Sanrio Time,’ now and ever after

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